Non-ethical fixes: moral ecology, markets and the burden of responsibility in Jordan’s water crisis.

Abstract (English)

Anthropologists in a variety of fields have taken interest in the concept of the ‘ethical fix(er)’ (Pia 2017, Bear 2014, Cousins 2015). It offers purchase at an ethnographic scale on the ways various practices associated with global contemporary financialised capitalism are mediated and made to ‘work’ on the ground, without leading to the various severe if uneven types of socio-ecological unravelling that they seem to threaten. The tensions of commoditised and financialised water supply, imposed as part of neoliberal economic reforms over much of the world in recent decades, create exactly the condition where such fixes would be expected; where older moral ecologies and economies, and notions of commons, intersect uneasily with techno-managerial and economised modes of water operation, causing officials to find unofficial work arounds and ways of mediating between the system they are part of and the people depending on the water. Yet in Jordan, it is just this tense intersection between the official and the mediated realities of water that gives rise to the practices most Jordanians see as the most cut-throat, unethical and exploitative; the market in private tanker water. This market, which the state has failed to fully regulate, has been implicated in the crisis of groundwater over abstraction in Jordan, lowering water tables, by over-drawing water from illegally-drilled wells. Though threatening ruin, these activities are treated as beyond largely the responsibility of the official water system, yet they occur largely due to its many failings. Tanker water markets provide water, at a steep environmental and financial cost, to those not reached or let down by official system, often serving to paper over the infrastructural cracks and breakdowns in urban water systems across the Global South. They also, unlike the often loss-making municipal water systems they mediate, often generate considerable profit, both for the tanker firm and for those who supply them with water, often illegally. Thinking with this understudied and under-theorised element of water mediation has a potential to generate new understandings of how water infrastructures and their techno-managerial logics intersect with embedded moral ecologies of water and popular moral critiques, as well as where responsibility for environmental damage and the ethical burden of seeking to profit from environmental commons lies.